


The Life and Death of Momose Saki and... After?

by FirebirdsDaughter



Series: Game Demos - Works of Kamen Rider Ex-Aid [1]
Category: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Genre: F/M, Spoilers, previously established character death, we have no info on Saki's past in the show so I made it up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 00:00:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11092653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FirebirdsDaughter/pseuds/FirebirdsDaughter
Summary: A small look at the life of Momose Saki, starting from the beginning to the end... And afterwards?





	The Life and Death of Momose Saki and... After?

She had always been someone who defied the whole world.  
When she was born, she’d had a weak heart, and a nurse had even told her parents she might not make it. She’d proved them wrong just a month later.  
When she was five, she came across a bunch of older boys beating up a puppy, and had leapt in to save it. She sent for of the five home with bite marks and scratches, the last one with a bloody nose and blurry eye. Then she brought the small animal to the nearest animal hospital and saw it nursed back to health. When she got back to her house, she learned that the fathers of the boys had phoned hers, and she was scolded profusely for being so unladylike. In the end, however, her mother let her keep the dog, and she named him Yasu.  
When she was ten, a boy at school tried to grab her butt and she kicked him in the balls. She thought her father was going to have an aneurysm when the teacher told him, and that her mother would have laughed if she hadn’t died of illness two years before.  
When she was fifteen, she announced to her father that she wanted to be a vet when Yasu, ten years old then and very slow, was hit by a car and died of his wounds. Her father was shocked, saying that girls of her status didn’t do jobs like that—that she was a lady, and ladies should not be immersing themselves in such ‘disgusting’ things. He hated that she showed such an affinity for it, getting into extra courses far above her grade level. It was from that day on she began to feel like a stranger to her father.  
When she was twenty, she was in university, and never visited home. She hung out with the preMed girls, working together on homework and projects. That was when she learned Hiiro’s name, talking with the others in front of one the medical buildings when he walked past in her line of sight. She had seen him before, studying late in the library, and she turned to the girls to question them.  
“Who is that?”  
“Him? That’s Kagami Hiiro. Apparently he skipped a bunch of grades or something, and he’s really attractive, but he’s kinda a jerk.”  
“Really? I’ve never spoken to him.”  
“Don’t. It’s like he thinks he’s better than everyone else, you know? Just let him, I don’t know, be happy in his own little world or something.” The others headed off, but she stayed there, staring after him, thinking of the times she’d seen him in the library late at night, hunched over a book or a screen. He always had the same face—serious, focused, but also like he was clenching his teeth just a little too tightly.  
“No…” She’d murmured to herself. “There’s nothing happy about that. Just look at him.”  
That night, she joined him in the library.  
He looked up when she came in, but made no other response, so she seated herself at a table where she could see him, and got to work. When he left at the wee hours, so did she.  
Over the next few months, she practiced the same ritual—and every time he stopped reacting to her presence, she would move a little closer. By the end of the semester, she’d made it to the same table, just a few chairs away. When they came back from break, she inched even nearer, and finally, decided to try speaking to him.  
“I’m Saki. Momose Saki.” She held out her hand. When he looked at her then, she was treated to the most relaxed expression she’d ever seen on his face—surprise. His mouth was slightly open, eyes just a little wide as they flicked between her face and her extended hand. The furrow in his brow made her think that he wasn’t so much shocked by her voice, but the fact that she was talking to him at all. When he continued to not move, she lowered her hand. “That’s alright. Sorry if I came on a little strong. I know your name, anyway.” He kept looking at her like she was speaking a language he didn’t know, she didn’t wait for him to respond. “I’m studying to be a veterinarian.” She slid her chair over to peer at the book he’d been looking at. “You’re… Pre-Med, surgical focus. Cool.” She gave him one of her biggest smiles. “Glad to be studying with you!”  
She always greeted him, after that, and even started getting a nod in response, though he still didn’t speak himself. After several weeks of listening to her own voice, she paused in the middle of a story in exasperation.  
“… So, Ako-chan was just…” She looked over at him, still bent over his book. “… Just…” She trailed off, and there was silence for a moment.  
“Just what?” She jumped, turning her head quickly. He was actually looking up at her, with something that might have been interest in his expression. It took her another moment to realise he had even spoken, much less asked her a question.  
“Just… Just… Oh, I don’t know! I’m sorry. I have a tendency to start rattling off if people let me. I’m probably boring you—I’m sure I’m boring you; I’ll just stop talking now.” She quickly dove back into her own work. A moment of more silence followed.  
“You’re not.” His voice made her look up once more. He was still watching her with that same, curious face. “You’re not boring me.” Unsure of what to say to that, she sunk her teeth into her lip. He seemed to see that cue, because he continued. “I… I haven’t really talked to anyone in a while.” That she could believe.  
“Talked to? I’ve been talking at you all this time. You haven’t said a word for the past two months.” His expression changed a little at that, and he gave what might have been a nod. She took it for acquiescence.  
“Yes, well… It’s been kind of, I suppose…”  
“… Lonely?” She finished for him, making his eyes shoot back to her face. He didn’t confirm it, but he didn’t deny it, either.  
“… Quiet.” Same thing, in this case. “And… Well, when you talk, it… Your voice makes the quiet go away. It’s… It’s kind of nice.” She was grateful that he had dropped his eyes back to his study materials, because she was certain she was blushing. There was another pause. “So, uh… Keep talking, by all means. If you want.” She sat perfectly still, staring at him, opening and closing her mouth a few times before she collected herself.  
That time, when she bit her lip, there was a smile attached.  
She started talking to him outside of their midnight study halls, as well. Ignoring shocked looks and rolling eyes, especially after she found him loitering at the spot they usually passed each other three days in a row and realised he had been waiting for her.  
At some point over the course of the year, she fell in love.  
One of the things she’d learned about Hiiro was that, deep down, he was shy—he would talk animatedly with her while they were alone in the library, but let her do all the speaking in public. He was standoffish because he didn’t know how to interact with others, preferring to hide behind a veneer of coldness rather than let his feelings out in the open because he feared scrutiny and pain. The perfection he was always demanding of everyone else was a standard he set for himself, as well—and she had the sense he didn’t think he lived up to it. Hell, he was younger than her, too , and that fueled her protectiveness.  
That was why she decided she should ask him out, rather than wait for him to bring it up—because he’d probably thought about it and convinced himself he didn’t deserve her, or that she didn’t think of him that way. She did it as carefully as she could, afraid that ot would seem she was pressuring him to say yes, but then he smiled at her for the first time, and her heart started doing handstands.  
She met his father a year later, waiting outside of the hospital for him. Sitting on a bench, she discovered a spider web beneath it, and crouched down to look. Trapped by the web, a moth was struggling vainly, weakly flapping its wings. She reached out to help it, then saw the spider, a fairly small one, crawling about by the corner. She was wringing her hands and biting her lip when footsteps sounded behind her.  
“Are you alright?” She started, looking up. Behind her was a tall man with dark hair, slightly preturbed eyebrows, clutching a clipboard to his chest as he tilted his head at her.  
“Oh! Yes, of course!” She moved so he could see her dilemma. “See, there’s a moth in the spider web.” He leaned down to peer over her shoulder.  
“Oh my… You want to free it?”  
“That’s the problem. If I save the moth, the spider might starve!” He looked back at her with what she was sure was disbelief, but she was too involved in her dithering to check. Finally, a strong breeze came and wafted the whole web away, inhabitants with it.  
“Ah!” She jumped up, reaching out like she could catch it. “It blew away! Oh no…” She sat back on the bench dejectedly, and was surprised when the man sat beside her.  
“It’s alright. There will be other moths in spiderwebs.” She giggled, looking over at him, sending a quick glance to his name tag, and gasping softly.  
“You’re Kagami Haima-san?” He blinked at her, a little like a bird.  
“Eh?” She got to her feet quickly and bowed.  
“I’m Momose Saki. I’m actually waiting for your son Hiiro.” Then he jumped up excitedly, waving his hands like he’d forgotten he had the clipboard.  
“You’re Saki-chan?” This time he actually dropped the thing, grabbing her offered hand in both of his and shaking it enthusiastically. “I’m so glad to meet you! I’ve heard a lot about you!” She raised her eyebrow at him. “Okay, well, not a ‘lot’ but I have heard of you!” This got her to laugh, and she gladly chatted with him until Hiiro should up. When he saw the two of them together, his usual serious expression gave way to one of apprehension and embarrassment, though she thought there was relief in there, too. Eventually, he got her away from his father’s animated conversation, but not before the elder Kagami had made her promise to come to the house for dinner—when Hiiro had tried to object, she’d elbowed him in the ribs.  
A year and a half later, she got sick.  
It was a weird thing, really. She was volunteering at an animal shelter when she noticed a young man across the street collapse. Concerned, she hurried over, crouching down and touching his shoulder.  
“Are you alright?” He looked up at her at the sound of her voice; he was even younger than she had thought, with dark, curly hair, long black jacket, and funny pants covered in pixels. But she was thinking less about his odd clothing, and more about how he seemed to be unwell. He blinked at her a few times, then smiled, sitting up and brushing himself off.  
“I’m fine.” He told her.  
Looking back, she later realised she should have found that smile unsettling.  
Instead, she rose, offering her hand to help him up. He took it, but stumbled again, knocking up a cloud of dust from the ground  
Which she would later learn had not been dust at all.  
With a few coughs, however, it seemed to clear up, and he nodded politely to her before going on his way.  
A few months later, when telling Hanaya Taiga how it happened, he would bemoan that a simple act of compassion could result in this.  
Over the next month, she started to notice it. Fatigue, at first, then dizziness, tunnel vision, nausea. But the thing that convinced her it was not an ardinary disease was when she was talking to Hiiro about their approaching Finals, and he made an offhand comment about not sleeping. Worry seized in her stomach, and she put a hand there to try and ease it.  
Then everything went fuzzy for a moment.  
She stopped walking beside her boyfriend and looked down at herself, astonished to find her body looked like it was fading in and out of reality, pixels flashing through it. She couldn’t stop the surprised gasp that made Hiiro turn, and the thought immediately leapt to her mind that he couldn’t know about this. Despite outward appearances, Hiiro was a very intense person, when he got involved in something, it was like it consumed his whole being. He was already on the edge of Finals. If he knew she was sick…  
Fortunately, the effect had stopped by the time he looked, whether by force of her own will or luck. Still, he was looking at her with a concerned expression.  
“Are you alright?” She pushe done of her customary smiles on to her face and bounced on her heels, trotting up beside him.  
“Just fine!” But she didn’t feel fine.  
She’d never tell him, but she had been listening the time his father told him anout the Game Disease outbreak. Just around the corner, a hand over her mouth. She’d fled before they’d discovered her, but she knew enough to guess what was happening to her. Still, she’d never been good at thinking about herself.  
She was resolved to keep Hiiro from knowing, but their constant companionship meant he would eventually find out. She could think of only one way to keep him permanently in the dark, to make sure he stayed on task as much as possible.  
She broke up with him.  
It hurt, especially the shocked look on his face, the way he said her name. They hadn’t really been having problems, so to him it must have come out of left field. But with that tie cut, she ran, hurrying to the hospital where she knew she would find Haimajii-san.  
Her disease struck with a vengeance part way there, taking it’s own form.  
She stumbled down the hall, yelling for Haima, until he came out of whatever room he’d been in and saw her sagging against the wall, rushing over.  
“Saki-chan! Saki-chan!” It felt a little good to hear someone say her name in that tone, especially when her own father had long since given up speaking to her. She collapsed into his arms, shaking, and her vision did the now-familiar blurr that menat she was disappearing again.  
“I…” She fumbled with the words. “I… I think I might…” He was already yelling for someone named Asuna, for a stretcher.  
It was quiet in Cyber Rescue, as she listened to the whirr of machines and the rustle of the nurse, Asuna, moving about in the other room. She vaguely remembered meeting Hanaya Taiga once or twice while visiting the hospital—a radiologist, Hiiro had told her, when she’d asked. She knew they clashed a little over their different natures, but Hanaya had been perfectly nice to her when she was brought in.  
Said he had lost someone important to him before, and he didn’t want anyone else to go through that.  
Still, her condition got progressively worse and worse, no matter what they did. She wasn’t enturely sure what they were doing, but Haima promised her she would be okay, even as she extracted promises from him and everyone else not to tell Hiiro.  
On the final day, someone broke their word, and she suspected it was his father.  
Hiiro was upset, and she really couldn’t blame him. She had kept a secret from him, after all. She could feel herself disappearing as she smiled at him sadly, asking for one last thing.  
“Promise me.” She murmured. “Promise me you’ll become the best doctor in the world.”  
And the very last piece of her vanished.

She wasn’t sure what she had expected death to be like, but she had thought she’d be much less aware.  
It had started recently, she thought. Time was difficult to gaunge when you were somewhere in what seemed like amorpheous nothingness. She had woken up, which she was fairly certain was something people who died did not usually do. She felt odd, though. Like she wasn’t quite herself. Her memories were there, but she was vaguely detached from them.  
_I’m not supposed to be here_.  
She was confident that there wasn’t meant to be a subversion for death, and tried reaching out into the mysterious emptiness, in some way she didn’t know how. The awareness slowly started to collect, and the next thing she knew, she could tell what was going on outside of… Wherever it was she was. She could here and see, there, but not there. She picked up little bits of the story.  
The man with the long hair was bad, she was sure of that much. She saw some faces she knew—Hanaya, Asuna, Haima. The young man she’d been trying to help when she was infected. There was another with him that had a strange familiarity about him. Like she’d known him very well a long time ago, but couldn’t place where.  
But the one who monopolised her attention was Hiiro.  
He was a little different from when she had been alive, she could see that. She was gladdened by the way he looked at the intern, Asuna, even Hanaya.  
_Good_. _He has friends_. _They will take care of him_.  
But then things went wrong.  
_No_. _No_! She screamed soundlessly into the void, struggling to reach out. _I don’t want this_. _Don’t do this for me_. They couldn’t hear her, no one could. But she kept screaming anyway.  
_It has to be me_. That, she knew. _He has to hear it from me_. _I have to be the one to tell him it’s okay_. _That’s the only way it will get through_.  
And she would have, if she could have. But no matter how hard she shrieked and screamed into the nothing around her, it never made a difference. She wanted him to stop, to go home, but his determination had set in, and unless she looked him hard in the eye and brought him to his senses, it was unlikely anyone could.  
So she kept shouting, wailing. In whatever dimension she was in, she found her voice didn’t go hoarse, so she continued to holler silently, the words being eaten up by the emptiness.  
**I hear you** , **child**.  
She didn’t hear the voice, exactly, but it reverbated deep within her, in whatever form it was she had in this place.  
**I hear you**. **I hear your wish**.  
A surge of power, relief, hope, washed through her, and white sparkle filled her vision, however it was she was seeing, taking a humanoid form.  
**I will help you.**  
The words were a promise. Saki believed them.

**Author's Note:**

> Just something I felt I should write in regards to recent events. A few of these scenes were inspired by bits and pieces of other stories (I can think of two off the top of my head; the Bourne Identity and Phantom Stallion series). They just fit so well with the characters, I had to use them.  
> I really love Hiiro, and I hope the writers don't mess up his character with this.


End file.
